“Broken City” and Films Within Films

The story of how corruption at the top blights the lives of everyday people that’s told in Allen Hughes’s new film, “Broken City,” which opens today (here’s my capsule review), ought to have been so much more. It stars Mark Wahlberg as Billy Taggart, an ex-cop under a cloud of suspicion, now a private eye, who’s brought in to spy on the Mayor’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) by the Mayor himself, (Russell Crowe), a gruff populist demagogue in the stretch drive of his campaign for reëlection. In the process, higher-level real-estate scandals emerge surrounding a sweetheart deal that’s a key debate issue. Urban politics are cinematic catnip for their instant span from street to boardroom, and that’s why, while sitting through the flashy yet airtight theatrics of this new film, fond memories flashed of James Gray’s “The Yards,” from 1999, also starring Wahlberg in a story centered on the politics and the business of shady official deal-making. Among the great pleasures of that film (a clip from which I discussed here recently) is the pungent characterization of the Queens Borough Hall politicians who play along—or don’t—with the schemes, depending on how the winds of public opinion are blowing. The casting and direction of Steve Lawrence, as the Borough President, and of Tony Musante, as his chief aide, are so sharp as to suggest a whole extra movie within the movie.

In “Broken City,” Crowe’s mayoral campaign fits the movie’s swift but narrow current and never risks overflowing. But there is one scene, a literal movie within the movie, that reaches a high level of comic invention and thematic richness (which, unfortunately, Hughes leaves undeveloped). Taggart’s girlfriend, Natalie (Natalie Martinez), is an aspiring actress who has recently gotten her first big break—the lead role in an independent film—and she brings him to the première screening. Hughes shows a few brief snippets from that film—a soft-toned, soft-core romance called “Kiss of Life,” in which flowery dialogue and poetic views of nature are followed by the actress’s hot and naked sex scene with the sensitive leading man.

Hughes started out two decades ago, at the age of twenty, with his twin brother, Albert, making “Menace II Society,” not exactly a classic indie (made with an estimated $3.5 million budget under the aegis of New Line Cinema), but which received three Independent Spirit Award nominations, including Best First Feature, and won for cinematography. It’s revealing that, even then, the award for Best Feature went to “Short Cuts” and the one for Best Director went to Robert Altman, signalling the shift of major Hollywood artists away from the studios and toward independent financing that continues to this day. It’s apt that this parody of the crowd-pleasing indie should appear today, with the Sundance festival getting under way. The very notion of a Sundance film—sentimental intimacy, whether gently whimsical or psychologically “dark,” or Op-Ed-styled social concerns distilled into manipulative or deterministic drama—has become a living cinematic parody (and some of the more interesting entries this year suggest that the programmers know it). But if Hughes is mocking the other of “two cinemas”—the idea of a gentrified youth cinema conceived for sale to Hollywood, as opposed to one that takes seriously the stuff of power—he risks, at the same time, the other side of parody, the unintended self-parody of an issue-centered cinema that neglects its characters and turns them into stick figures in a morality play.

Nonetheless, it’s the one moment in the film in which Hughes seems to come out from behind the camera and assert himself, assert some pissiness, some rancor, some righteous derision. It’s as if filming as not-himself freed his cinematic id in a way that’s missing from the rest of the movie. The very genre of the film-within-a-film is a notable one—as in Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.,” where the projectionist’s dream fuses with the bland melodrama he’s projecting. There’s the “fight of the gods against Ulysses,” the footage shot (by the second unit) for Fritz Lang’s “Odyssey,” in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (and, whatever else it is, it’s unlike anything else that Godard had shot to that time). Impersonation may be an extraordinarily constructive mode for filmmakers; the exercise of style, similar to that of painters who go to museums to copy the works of masters, could prove to be a distinctive form of artistic liberation. That’s another reason why the art of direction needs, at least, from time to time, to be liberated from that of screenwriting—why great directors ought to swap scripts, milieux, and moods, why commissioned projects or ones taken over from other directors (cf. “Magic Mike”) or genre films can be extraordinarily fruitful. It requires the step back, the step away from oneself—even if to look all the more clearly and directly into the mirror.

This Sunday, at Film Forum, there’s a low-budget film noir, “Blast of Silence,” directed by Allen Baron, that’s not to be missed (if you must miss it, there’s also a Criterion DVD). Baron also stars (Peter Falk, for whom the role was meant, got another job instead), and I suspect that it’s for the best: the existentially bleak hit-man tale is shattered by Baron’s scrutiny of his own blank mask-like face. Paradoxically, movies in which the director films him- or herself stand alongside the genre film and the commissioned film as divided and distanced directorial experiences—movies that, rather than stepping back from the mirror, pass through it.

Photograph: FOX.

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